Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

by Tyler Cowen

We need to develop a tougher, more dedicated, and indeed a more stubborn attachment to prosperity and freedom.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a typical worker might have put in somewhere between 2,800 and 3,300 hours of work a year; that estimate is now closer to 1,400 to 2,000 hours a year.

For all the recent increases in inequality within individual nations, global inequality has declined over the last few decades, in large part because of growth in China and India.

Robert E. Lucas, Nobel Laureate in Economics, put the point succinctly: “The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are staggering: once one starts to think about [exponential growth], it is hard to think about anything else.”

we should redistribute wealth only up to the point that it maximizes the rate of sustainable economic growth.

So rather than redistributing most wealth, we can do better for the world by investing in high-return activities like supporting immigration and producing new technologies with global reach, such as cell phones and new methods for boosting agricultural productivity.